SurveyMonkey

Are my survey responses anonymous and secure?

Survey creators can decide to collect responses anonymously or to track respondents.

Personal information can be collected by a survey creator in two ways: (1) by expressly asking you for your personal details in the survey and (2) by configuring the survey collector options to automatically collect certain information.

We provide several survey distribution methods called collectors. Every collector type has different settings or collector options that affect the survey-taking experience and what respondent information is recorded.

  • All collectors allow the survey creator to turn Anonymous Responses on or off, except Facebook Messenger collectors.
  • All collectors allow the survey creator to track IP addresses or not, except Facebook Messenger collectors.
  • Email Invitation collectors allow the survey creator to track email invitations.
  • Each response recorded through the Facebook Messenger collector is associated with the respondent's first and last name from Facebook. At this time, there's no way to turn this off. Additionally, this collector type does not record IP address. Facebook may also have access to the responses as the provider of Facebook Messenger, please see Facebook's Data Policy for additional information.
  • Some integrations create collectors automatically in SurveyMonkey. An integration's anonymity settings determine whether SurveyMonkey collectors record identifying information about the survey taker. For example, Microsoft Teams records the First and Last name of survey takers, unless Keep responses anonymous was selected.

Remember to consider in each case where you use anonymous settings, and whether the questions you are asking could identify a person in any case. For example, this may happen if you are only surveying a small pool of people and the questions collect demographic data (e.g., male/female, age range, etc.) that could imply identity. In such cases, you may want to describe your survey as “confidential”, “pseudonymous” or “partially de-identified” instead.

Survey creators may have their own privacy policies which apply to surveys that they create using our services and that detail how they handle your personally identifiable information or personal data.

  • We encourage you to read any such policy, or to contact the survey creator directly to ask them any questions about their privacy practices.
  • If the survey creator has not disclosed the collection method in the introduction of the survey, please contact them to verify if the response is anonymous.

Review our Privacy Notice and how we handle respondents’ personal information.

SurveyMonkey takes our users’ security and privacy concerns seriously. We strive to ensure that user data is kept secure, and that we collect only as much personal data as is required to make our users’ experience with SurveyMonkey as efficient and satisfying as possible. We also aim to collect data in the most unobtrusive manner possible. We aim to be transparent about our security infrastructure and practices to help reassure you that your data is sufficiently protected. SurveyMonkey is also ISO27001 certified. For more details, see our Security Statement.

Surveys begin with https:// which means your survey responses are sent over a secure, encrypted connection.